Beaverton's
Hall Street Grill, all decked out for the holidays with red ribbons and
twinkly lights, looks like the kind of place where you might host an
anniversary party or hide out for a two-hour business lunch. It doesn't
look like the kind of place where you might find out-of-the-ordinary
food. Yet there on the menu, next to the Caesar salad and the prime rib,
is scrapple, the Mid-Atlantic "delicacy" of pig scraps formed into
juicy loaves of meat. And not only that, Hall Street's is made with
boar.

Like the restaurant's decor, the scrapple comes heavily
adorned, with welcome morels joined by diced squash, stewed cherries and
a healthy pool of port jus. Underneath it all, the scrapple -- tossed
with blue corn meal and seared on both sides to a satisfying crispness
-- tastes great, its texture somewhere between slow-braised short ribs
and another gut-warming guilty pleasure, Spam.